Wireless collaboration

National Instruments is collaborating with WisyTech, a wireless systems specialty spin-off of Italy’s National Research Council and Politecnico di Milano, to develop a WiMAX toolkit for the LabVIEW graphical system design platform.

The plug-in toolkit will extend the LabVIEW graphical programming environment to engineers developing WiMAX RF-compliant devices, semiconductors, base stations and customer premises equipment.

It will give engineers a test solution that combines the WiMAX expertise of WisyTech with National Instruments LabVIEW and its 6.6 GHz PXI-based RF vector signal generator and vector signal analyser instruments.

Used for fixed and mobile communications, WiMAX is a telecommunications technology based on the IEEE 802.16 standard that is growing in the communications industry and has been deployed in several countries, including South Korea, Taiwan and India.

The new toolkit will deliver a plug-and-play solution for testing mobile devices and base stations based on the WiMAX standard. With signal-generation capabilities, the toolkit will make it possible for engineers to generate, store and analyse WiMAX I/Q baseband signals to test and troubleshoot WiMAX devices.

The companies claim that the new toolkit will be compatible with the recently released NI PXIe-5663 6.6 GHz RF vector signal analyser and the NI PXIe-5673 6.6 GHz RF vector signal generator and will allow RF measurements to be made up to 10 times faster than traditional RF instrumentation. It will also support both the IEEE 802.16d-2004 (Fixed) and 802.16e-2005 (Mobile) wireless standards.